The law of the leading digits and the world religions

Abstract: Benfordís law states that the occurrence of significant digits in many data sets is not uniform but tends to follow a logarithmic distribution such that the smaller digits appear as first significant digits more frequently than the larger ones. We investigate here numerical data on the country-wise adherent distribution of seven major world religions i.e. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism and Bahaíism to see if the proportion of the leading digits occurring in the distribution conforms to Benfordís law. We find that the adherent data of all the religions, except Christianity, excellently does conform to Benfordís law. Furthermore, unlike the adherent data on Christianity, the significant digit distribution of the three major Christian denominations i.e. Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy obeys the law. Thus in spite of their complexity general laws can be established for the evolution of religious groups.

Bibtex:@article{,
title={The law of the leading digits and the world religions},
author={Mir, Tariq Ahmad},
journal={Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications},
volume={391},
number={3},
pages={792--798},
year={2012},
publisher={Elsevier},
DOI={doi:10.1016/j.physa.2011.09.001},
}